Star Trek: Enterprise Third Season
Original air dates: September 2003 – May 2004
Executive Producers: Rick Berman, Brannon Braga
Captain’s log. Enterprise has entered the Delphic Expanse in an attempt to find the Xindi, whom they were told were responsible for the attack on Earth that killed seven million people.
Their travels take them to a prison planet, to a slave auction, and to a dude living his best Phantom of the Opera life. They also find the cause of the Expanse’s weirdness: some nasty spheres that warp the space and cause the anomalies.
As the season progresses, we learn more about the Xindi, including that there are five different sub-species: Primates, Aboreals, Aquatics, Insectoids, and Reptilians. A civil war destroyed their homeworld—and wiped out the sixth sub-species, the Avians—and they’re now searching for a new one. But they also have been told by the Guardians, extradimensional aliens who have aided them in the time of strife, that humans will wipe out this new homeworld in the future, so the Xindi must destroy Earth first.
In truth, the Guardians are the people who built the spheres, information they have kept from the Xindi. The spheres are designed to convert our space-time into something they can live in.
With occasional detours to the Fun With DNA™ Planet and the Western Planet, Enterprise learns that a Primate named Degra is in charge of building a large super-weapon that will finish the job started by the prototype that fired on Central America. Over the course of the season, Archer and the gang manage to convince at least some of the Xindi Council that it would be wrong to blow up an entire damn planet, and at the same time Enterprise realizes that the Xindi aren’t just evil murdering bad guys, but a refugee people in fear for the future.
Archer manages to get the Primates, Arboreals, and Aquatics on his side (the latter takes some convincing), but the Reptilians and Insectoids remain on Team Sphere-Builders and continue with the plan to blow up Earth. In the end, after many sacrifices and serious damage to Enterprise (and with help, not just from 3/5 of the Xindi but also Shran and the Andorians), they save Earth and destroy the sphere network. But Earth’s entire history may have been altered?
Highest-rated episode: A tie between “Stratagem” and “The Forgotten,” both well-deserved 10s.
Lowest-rated episode: “North Star,” with an even more well-deserved 1.
Most comments (as of this writing): “Similitude” with 57, which is not surprising, given the moral issues raised by the storyline.
Fewest comments (as of this writing): “Doctor’s Orders” with 23. I guess folks figured they talked about that plot enough when it was Voyager’s “One.”
Favorite Can’t we just reverse the polarity? From “Harbinger”: Reed and Hayes stop the alien by actually reversing the polarity of the plasma coils. It’s awesome.
Favorite The gazelle speech: From “Anomaly”: Archer shows that he’s a real man who doesn’t take any crap by shoving Orgoth in an airlock, because screw the rules, he’s the kind of guy who gets shit done.
Favorite I’ve been trained to tolerate offensive situations: From “North Star”: When T’Pol and Tucker are trying to obtain a horse, the stablemaster immediately asks them what happened to theirs—since they were obviously from out of town (the town is small enough that the stablemaster would know all the locals by sight), how’d they get there if not on horseback? While Tucker is stunned into silence because he didn’t think of that, T’Pol weaves a bullshit story about how their horses died in the heat. She does in that halting and hesitating manner that actors always use when they’re faking their way through a conversation. It’s never even remotely convincing, yet the person they’re talking to is almost always convinced by it.
I shouldn’t blame this scene for a trope that is a near-universal constant in performative fiction, but it has always annoyed me. Over-emphasizing the hesitating nature of it makes it blindingly obvious that the speaker is pulling the answer directly out of their asses, yet this rhetorical method rarely fails in the fictional setting. It works when played for laughs (to give one Trek example, the mechanical rice-picker bit from the original series’ “The City on the Edge of Forever”), but not in a serious situation. I much prefer it when the characters actually bluff their way through these conversations properly (to give another Trek example, when Dax was stuck in twenty-first-century San Francisco in DS9’s “Past Tense, Part I,” she referred to her combadge as a brooch and her Trill spots as tattoos without missing a beat).
Favorite Florida Man: From “The Xindi”: Florida Man Stars In Impromptu Porn Movie With Science Officer.
Favorite Optimism, Captain! From “Doctor’s Orders”: Phlox apparently needs “active” DNA to synthesize the anti-virus. It’s not clear what makes DNA “active” in this context, but apparently a peach T’Pol slobbered on suffices, but why that works when it’s been hours, possibly days, since she bit into it while whatever DNA samples Phlox must have around doesn’t is left as an exercise for the viewer.
Favorite Good boy, Porthos! From “Doctor’s Orders”: Until he starts hallucinating T’Pol, Porthos is Phlox’s only company on the ship, and it’s rather adorable watching them together, whether going on runs, talking about Porthos’ loyalty to Archer (at one point, Phlox does research and turns up a dog named Scruffers, who traveled three thousand kilometers to be reunited with his human), and with the pooch just generally being Phlox’s handy companion. Sadly, the dog is virtually abandoned once the fake T’Pol shows up…
Favorite Better Get MACO: From “Anomaly”: Three MACOs join the boarding party for the looted ship and the sphere, and the MACOs aid in the defense of Enterprise when its boarded, though they add nothing to either mission, not doing anything that Reed’s security detail couldn’t have handled. Indeed, the whole point of having the space Marines is to help them with things like repelling boarding parties, so you’d think they’d be better at it…
Favorite Ambassador Pointy: From “Twilight”: Soval tries to get T’Pol to abandon Archer and the humans and come home in the alternate timeline. She tells him to go fuck himself.
Favorite The Vulcan Science Directorate has determined… From “Azati Prime”: T’Pol FINALLY admits that time travel is a real thing, having apparently been convinced by traveling in time to twenty-first-century Detroit. It’s a testament to what a stubborn ass she’s been on the subject that Archer is genuinely surprised that she feels that way even after getting experiential evidence of time travel…
Favorite Blue meanies: From “Zero Hour”: For some inexplicable reason, they did not play the Mighty Mouse theme when Shran showed up.
Favorite No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: From “Harbinger”: The use of Vulcan neuropressure as a fig-leaf for sex in previous episodes becomes a transparent fig-leaf in this one, culminating in T’Pol coming on to Tucker in a manner that wouldn’t be out of place in a 1980s teen sex comedy.
Favorite More on this later… From “Azati Prime”: The Federation Starship Enterprise, introduced in “The Cage,” and seen captained by Pike (SNW, the original series’ “The Cage” and “The Menagerie,” season 2 of Discovery), Kirk (the original series and several movies), Decker (The Motion Picture), and Spock (The Wrath of Khan) had the registry NCC-1701. At the end of The Voyage Home, a new Enterprise was constructed (the original having gone boom in The Search for Spock) and it had the registry of NCC-1701-A, seen subsequently in The Final Frontier and The Undiscovered Country. That set a precedent that has been continued through several spinoffs. The Enterprise-B was seen in Generations; the Enterprise-C in TNG’s “Yesterday’s Enterprise”; the Enterprise-D throughout TNG, in Generations, and in Picard’s “Vox” and “The Last Generation”; the Enterprise-E in First Contact, Insurrection, and Nemesis; the Enterprise-F in “Vox”; and the Enterprise-G in “The Last Generation.” The ship Daniels brings Archer to is the Enterprise-J in the twenty-sixth century, which means they’ll go through the G, H, and I before commissioning the J in a hundred-plus (obviously very tumultuous) years…
Favorite Welcome aboard: This season had a particularly long list of new recurring characters: Nathan Anderson (Kemper), Molly Brink (Talas), Steven Culp (Hayes), Daniel Dae Kim (Chang), Josette di Carlo (the Sphere-Builder emissary), Scott MacDonald (Dolim), Seth MacFarlane (random engineer dude), Sean McGowan (Hawkins), Randy Oglesby (Degra), Tucker Smallwood (the Xindi-Primate councilor), and Rick Worthy (Jannar). In addition, already-established recurring regulars Gary Graham (“Twilght”), Matt Winston (“Carpenter Street,” “Azati Prime,” and “Zero Hour”), and Jeffrey Combs (“Proving Ground” and “Zero Hour”) show up. Plus, Adam Taylor Gordon twice plays a younger version of Tucker in “The Xindi” and “Similitude.”
Several Trek veterans are back for another go-round: Stephen McHattie and Richard Lineback (“The Xindi”), Dell Yount (“Rajiin”), John Cothran Jr. (“The Shipment”), Glenn Morshower and James Parks (“North Star”), Leland Orser (“Carpenter Street”), Conor O’Farrell and Gregory Wagrowski (“Chosen Realm”), Granville van Dusen (“Proving Ground”), Thomas Kopache (“Harbinger”), and the mighty Casey Biggs (“Damage”).
We get three Robert Knepper moments: Roger Cross (“Extinction”), Sam Witwer (“The Shipment”), and Jeffrey Dean Morgan (“Carpenter Street”).
But my favorite guest stars are three fantastic women who show up for one episode each and make great impressions: Emily Bergl is the one bright spot in the otherwise awful “North Star,” Noa Tishby is superb as a MACO Tucker flirts with in “Harbinger,” and Kipleigh Brown is tragically brilliant as the dream-image of the deceased Engineer Taylor in “The Forgotten.”
Favorite I’ve got faith… From “Damage”:
“‘We can’t save humanity without holding onto what makes us human.’ Those were your words to me.”
“I’m no happier doing this than you are—but we’re not going to make a habit of it.”
“Once you rationalize the first misstep, it’s easy to fall into a pattern of behavior.”
–T’Pol throwing Archer’s words back in his face, Archer insisting he can quit any time, and T’Pol speaking the wisdom of the junkie.
Favorite Trivial matter: A tie between the ones for “Anomaly” and “E2” which both had incredibly trivial matters in them…
It’s been a long road… “Your captain’s sacrifice will not be forgotten.” This season definitely gets an A for ambition. The notion of doing a season-long story arc wasn’t radical in 2003, but it was not as common as it is twenty years later, either.
Unfortunately, the execution is mostly a disaster.
I will give them credit for a generally strong climax. The run of episodes from “Proving Ground” to “The Council” is some very good stuff (despite the drag effect of “Hatchery” and “E2”), even if the repetitive “Countdown” and the bludgeony “Zero Hour” end things kind of weakly, if loudly.
But getting there is a slog. The Expanse is this horrible area of space that’s so dangerous the Vulcans were desperate to keep Enterprise out of there for their own safety. Yet when they get there, they just encounter stuff that they easily could’ve come across in the rest of the galaxy. We get The Prison Episode, The Space Pirates Episode, The Slave Girl From Outer Space Episode, The Western Episode, The Phantom of the Opera Ripoff Episode, The Time Travel To When The Show Is Actually Filmed Episode, and, of course, Fun With DNA™. However, with very rare exceptions—the horror-movie-esque “Impulse,” the wonderful alternate history of “Twilight,” and the magnificently Trekkish “The Shipment”—there’s not a lot here that really a) moves the story forward and b) is any good. B) is the bigger problem, truly, not aided by all the different through-lines to the season beyond stopping the Xindi, very few of which work.
Let’s start with what seems to be the biggest addition: the Military Assault Command Operations troops, a.k.a. the MACOs. After all the fanfare about adding space Marines to the crew, they proceed to do absolutely nothing that couldn’t be done by Reed’s security force. Worse, on several occasions (“Anomaly,” “Rajiin,” “Twilight,” “Hatchery”), the MACOs were actively incompetent. They were never properly integrated into the cast, with no individual MACO appearing with a speaking part for more than a few episodes. A half-assed attempt was made to manufacture a conflict between Hayes and Reed in the fifteenth episode of a twenty-three-episode season, which is far too little way too late.
Then we have the use of “Vulcan neuropressure,” ostensibly a physical manipulation technique used for therapeutic purposes, in reality a feeble excuse for borderline softcore porn scenes between T’Pol and Tucker (a border that’s crossed in “Harbinger”). On top of that, T’Pol is turned into a junkie for no compellingly good reason, a lovely bit of character assassination. Seriously, T’Pol has consistently been portrayed as the only grownup on the ship. Why would she decide in the middle of a dangerous, critical mission to experiment on her emotional state?
The season suffers from several intrusions of the dumbshit Temporal Cold War into the storyline, most obnoxiously in the wretched “Carpenter Street,” but also in “Azati Prime” and “Zero Hour.”
Buy the Book
The Jinn Bot of Shantiport
And then we have the Xindi themselves. At first, we get what seems to be a nifty five-species setup, but after that, the writers take the lazy way out, as it quickly becomes clear that the Xindi who look like humans or cute animals are friendly, while the ones who look like less conventionally cuddly animals and who look like vermin are the unrepentant bad guys.
Plus, at no point do we ever get an adequate explanation for why the Xindi sent their prototype to Earth to, in essence, warn Earth that they were coming, a move of colossal tactical idiocy.
The one thing the season does well is something Trek has always excelled at, to wit, the compassionate and conversational solution rather than the violent one. From Kirk’s realizing that his violent assumptions were wrong in “Arena” and “Errand of Mercy” to both DS9’s Dominion War and Discovery’s Federation-Klingon war ending through acts of compassion and cleverness rather than military might, Trek at its best has always been at its best when its characters talk to each other and are nice to each other, whether it’s Picard telling Q that he needs the entity’s help against the Borg or the Discovery crew convincing Species 10C that they are sentient and can they stop blowing up our planets please or Jonathan Archer convincing at least some of the Xindi Council—as well as the scientist who’s building the superweapon—that maybe genocide isn’t the solution to the Xindi’s problems.
In “The Forgotten” we also have one of Trek’s best meditations on death. One of Enterprise’s best features has been its repudiation of Trek’s appalling reliance on the redshirt trope, and this season in general and “The Forgotten” in particular do a great job of representing that repudiation.
This season was, in many ways, a harbinger of things to come. Of the five shows that have come after Enterprise, three of them—Discovery, Picard, and Prodigy—have adopted the story-in-a-season model. However, those seasons are generally between ten and a dozen episodes, not twenty-three. (Prodigy’s first season was twenty episodes, though it can very easily be separated into two discreet ten-episode bits.) Truly, the Xindi arc would’ve benefitted tremendously from needing fewer episodes to tell the story…
Warp factor rating for the season: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be an author guest at ConnectiCon XX in Hartford at the Connecticut Convention Center this weekend. He’ll have a table where he’ll be selling and signing books, and also will be doing some panels. His full schedule can be found here.
I think my overall assessment of season 3 would be a little higher than yours, but it certainly was inconsistent. At least it was more ambitious than the humdrum season 2, though it definitely tried too hard to turn ENT into a show driven by big, noisy action and spectacle, not necessarily an improvement on the more slice-of-life workplace-drama approach of season 1 (which harkened back to season 1 of TOS taking a similar approach). Too much of the franchise since has maintained that big-action focus, with only Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds recapturing the workplace-drama/comedy approach.
Yeah, slog is the word for it. Never thought I’d be happy to see Nazis turn up, but anything other than the Xindi was a welcome sight for these tired eyes.
“Hope for the best, Doctor.”
I think I mostly agree with the assessment here. The Xindi arc works well, and I enjoyed the climax more than some, but some of the filler episodes were a bit too filler and often not very good. I do think that mainly applies to the first half of the season once they got into the swing of things. While there were some weaker episodes in the second half, they did at least feel like they belonged in the same season as the rest of it, rather than being something that could be slotted into the first two seasons with little or no adjustment.
The Expanse was one of those things that was built up a bit too much at the end of the second season only for them to have no idea how to pay it off. We do at least get the trellium-D explanation for why the Vulcans ended up in such a bad state compared to humans, and, while it gets forgotten a bit, they are at least consistent about the fact that the disturbances caused by the spheres makes it virtually impossible to leave the Expanse once you’re in, which explains why so many ships go missing there. But yes, that is a back-track because they can’t deliver what they originally promised.
I’ve been thinking about the Xindi probe more than I possibly should and I’ve found myself wondering if maybe the simplest answer is that it didn’t work? Maybe the original attack wasn’t a test run, it was intended to finish the job and destroy Earth. It was only when it didn’t work and instead alerted humanity to their presence that the Xindi became more cautious and started testing the weapons to perfection rather than just sending them in straightaway. But yes, that’s me trying to explain something that the show failed to!
I always thought that the better way to handle the whole Trellium-D addiction would have been to have T’Pol start out administering it to herself in small doses to build up immunity for the selfless effect of being able to then coat the ship with the stuff. You’d still be able to say it compromised her emotional control, etc. without some of the more character assassination bits of “experimenting with emotion” via drug use
I agree with the review: ambitious but inconsistent and I missed the episodic nature of most Star Trek series (to this point in history) and the crew boldly exploring. But there are at least several episodes in this season that I enjoy repeatedly viewing after all of these years.
I do need to point out there are 24 episodes in this season, not 23, as is mentioned a couple of times in this review (unless KRAD is inducing amnesia to forget “Twilight” ever existed).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Enterprise_(season_3)
I’m excited to dig into season 4, which I believe most people generally find to be the best season of this series.
@krad, being a man of simple tastes and forgiving spirit, I suspect my rating for this season would be higher than yours* – it’s not Peak STAR TREK, but there’s a great deal to enjoy in it
For one thing, I feel that showing T’Pol dealing with some Serious Dysfunction is a useful way to show how the Expanse is taking it’s toll on even the Strongest – in fact I found the season reasonably successful in evoking a sense of consistent threat and dangerous strangeness from the Delphic Expanse as a whole, as an ongoing reality and not just the latest menace of the week; I also actively enjoyed seeing MACOs flounder in the face of the usual Starfleet Adventures, because it makes perfect sense that an element so inherently Gung-ho wouldn’t work very well in the much less militaristic STAR TREK milieu (Though one would have liked to see that idea deployed with a little more conscious effort, rather than effectively by accident); I should also admit to rather enjoying the recurring notion that Lieutenant Reed is a much better officer when he keeps those less admirable tendencies of his firmly buttoned up under that stiff upper lip (It’s an amusing foil to all those “C’mon man, let your hair down and quite being such a killjoy” arcs to which conscientious characters in fiction are so often prey) and being deeply amused by the running joke that Vulcans HATE Time Travel (Having watched one too many episodes of DOCTOR WHO getting excessively clever with Time Travel, I’m periodically tempted to insist that it MUST NOT EXIST myself).
Finally, my relish for Old School Pulp Nonsense remains unashamed: ‘North Star’ remains a personal favourite (I’m not saying it’s very good, I’m saying that I love it anyway) and the sheer number of people actively disgusted by the prospect of STAR TREK VERSUS THE NAZIS leaves me deeply confused.
Anyway, I may disagree with some of your assessments @krad, but I would never question the quality of your reviews and am continuing to enjoy them a very great deal: my thanks for your continuing hard work and my compliments on your continuously successful efforts to keep us hooked on the good stuff! (-:
(Seriously though, never quit STAR TREK – just imagine the withdrawal symptoms!).
@@.-@. twels: That would, in fact, have been an excellent wrinkle to add to the arc.
It’s better than I remember it being, and it has some genuinely good moments in the last few episodes, but yeah: the Xindi arc is threadbare, overlong, and not particularly interesting. Even worse, it’s a harbinger of things to come–not just (as Krad notes) in terms of “epic” seasonal story arcs, but in terms, specifically, of 9/11 / War on Terror allegories (of which I count 4 in the first 2 decades of the 21st century, none of which have anything terribly insightful to say).
Anyways, it will be interesting to see what everyone has to say about season 4. When it came out, I considered it by far the best season of Enterprise, and I still thought that upon rewatching it, but the novelty of its continuity porn has really worn off.
I definitely look back at season 3 more fondly. It took a sinking show from the brink of cancellation and provided a much needed jolt to the franchise. The TNG 1989 story template for Trek that began under Michael Piller simply wasn’t working anymore. And it went the serialized route in ways even DS9 hadn’t. It took the Year of Hell approach and went with it all the way through. And it more or less set the serialized template for future Trek shows.
Was it perfect? Obviously not. Inconsistent? At times. But it had to be done. In an alternate scenario, had season 3 followed the same route as seasons 1 an 2, we can be sure season 4 never would have happened. And you could tell Brannon Braga was burning out from the pressure of cranking out 20+ episodes every year, while taking a new serialized approach he had no experience with. No wonder he appointed Coto to helm season 4. And the season’s pounding second half more than made up for the trials and tribulations of the first.
And while the loud banging action approach could be a detriment at times, the show didn’t lose focus of the fact that communication and diplomacy are ultimately what solve most of the conflict. Smart choice to make the Xindi future members of the Federation. The only obvious glaring issue on that front being the indirect racial profiling going on by making the Reptilians and Insectoids the real villains of the piece.
And it easily had the best music soundtrack of any Berman-era show since early TNG.
@9: My understanding is that season 3 did not provide the ratings jolt that the producers wanted. In fact, the ratings continued to slide. The show was still on the brink of cancellation but was saved really because of the need to get to 100 episodes (or close to it) for a syndication package and the budget for season 4 was slashed as well.
I still think the whole MACO thing is getting bashed unfairly.
If they had spread 10 months of story ime evenly over the episodes, it would have been a very badly paced season. So of course we see them fitting in (and ironing out spheres of responsibility) in the middle of the season, because, well, an episode or two with just a B-story would be kind of boring.
Another thing, possibly worthy of an entry for the next season: How about keeping track of time and distance anomalies? The speed of the impulse drive and at warp, the speed of a shuttlecraft, combat ranges, it seems they did not even try. Doctor’s Orders come to mind.
I remember when the MACO’s thing was introduced I was imagining it was going to be an outfit like the space marines from Aliens. Pity we didn’t get anything nearly as interesting or memorable. “Game over man! Game over!”
Eduardo: your first two paragraphs sound very much like revisionist history to me. The show wasn’t failing because the mode of telling stories had worn out its welcome, the show was failing because the stories were bad. Brannon Braga has proved in his career to be really good at creating content based on someone else’s vision, but when put in charge, he flounders. I said this in the 2000s and I say it again now in the 2020s: the reason why Enterprise was the first Trek spinoff to fail in the marketplace wasn’t because there was too much Trek, it’s because there was too much bad Trek.
And it wasn’t “necessary” as the ratings bump the Xindi arc was designed for never actually materialized, they just continued to stagnate and slide slowly downward. UPN’s lack of viable alternatives and the desire for a good-sized syndication package were why there was a fourth season. The Xindi arc wasn’t a Hail Mary pass that kept the game going, it was an incomplete pass that resulted in a do-over.
jaimebabb: Because I needed to watch many episodes of it for various works of Trek fiction I’ve either written or edited over the years, the fourth season of Enterprise is the one I was most familiar with prior to this rewatch, but I haven’t viewed any of them in 15 years or more. Be curious to see if my feelings about the continuity porn match yours. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Kind of a foregone conclusion – they established back in ep one that the Enterprise tops out at warp factor 5…
@13/krad: “Brannon Braga has proved in his career to be really good at creating content based on someone else’s vision, but when put in charge, he flounders.”
I agree with the rest of your comment, but I don’t think this part is quite accurate. Braga’s solid at executing another creator’s vision when that vision is sound. The reason he’s gotten so many showrunner gigs is presumably because he’s workmanlike and reliable when he’s in charge. And he’s never run a show that wasn’t created by someone else or co-created by himselfand a partner, so it doesn’t make sense to phrase it in terms of his solo ideas vs. his execution of others’.
I’ve seen it said that Braga’s weakness compared to other Trek showrunners was that he wasn’t as effective as they were at standing up to Rick Berman. It seems to me that the problem may be that Berman, who was more a production executive than a writer, was too far outside his wheelhouse when he became ENT’s co-showrunner and Braga’s regular writing partner. I figure Berman didn’t have the best ideas, and Braga didn’t have enough of his own independent creative vision, or enough showrunning experience at the time, to push back on Berman’s ideas and make them better.
@13/Krad: I don’t see my take as revisionist. Sure, we can agree that there were plenty of bad, underwhelming and otherwise disposable episodes that contributed to the decline. Just like there were a few excellent ones in-between. But I don’t think it’s a matter of good/bad episode ratio. You look at most episodes of Enterprise’s first two seasons. Granted, they tried setting it 200 years prior to the TNG era, with a catchy new theme song. But I’d still say there isn’t a lot there to differentiate them from anything made during Voyager’s run or even most of TNG’s run. Not just the stories, but the direction, the acting, and especially the pacing. The whole aesthetic of the Trek TV universe that began in 1987, and went on mostly unchanged for 16 years. The whole package starts to feel stale. DS9’s attempts at being different notwithstanding, I still feel the starship-based shows were getting to a point of diminishing returns, no matter if we got standout episodes like “Judgement” or “Cogenitor”. Trek just wasn’t a draw in a landscape that had shows like Alias and Lost, and even Moore’s BSG.
@16/Eduardo: “Trek just wasn’t a draw in a landscape that had shows like Alias and Lost“
I don’t see what other shows have to do with it. TOS was in a “landscape” dominated by plenty of spy shows, including sister series Mission: Impossible, and even more Westerns. Different shows have different viewers, and plenty of viewers like having a range of different shows to watch. So there’s no reason a show’s performance should be hampered by the existence of different shows. What hampers it is when the show itself just isn’t very good.
I don’t deny that Trek was stale by this point, but that’s not franchise fatigue on the audience’s part, it’s creative fatigue on the producers’ part. If Berman et al. had stepped back and turned over the reins to a fresh creative team, it might have revitalized Trek sooner.
I think that, if Strange New Worlds has shown anything, it’s that the Star Trek format works just as well now as it did in the 60s. The real problem with Enterprise was that the same general creative team had been behind Star Trek for up to 14 years when it started and they were out of ideas. That’s why so many of even the best episodes from the first three seasons are basically remakes of stories from TNG, DS9 or VOY (and why the infusion of new blood made season 4 the best, but we’ll come to that)
I’ve only watched this complete season twice, and both times I came away with the same opinion. It’s about half a dozen episodes worth of material made to stretch over two dozen episodes, leading to a lack of any sense of urgency, which is only magnified when they detour the plot for one of the many stand-alone episodes that were required to fill out the season. That’s a shame, since I preferred several of the smaller stand-alone episodes to the ongoing “save the Earth” plot. CLB said something about how too much Trek these days is big action instead of a workplace drama set in space, and I totally agree, and I think this is where that started (honestly it started with the movies, but this is where it started on TV) so I will always resent it a little bit for that.
#6 @ed
I wasn’t “actively disgusted by the prospect” of space Nazis, as even the dumbest ideas have potential (see “Iron Sky”). With the benefit of hindsight I was severely disappointment by the _result_. The silly cliffhanger left us with two bad episodes to clear the decks before season 4 can move on do something different. It again feels like another setup without a punchline, another case of the producers painting the show into a corner and leaving Manny Coto to figure a way out.
@13 said: I said this in the 2000s and I say it again now in the 2020s: the reason why Enterprisewas the first Trek spinoff to fail in the marketplace wasn’t because there was too much Trek, it’s because there was too much bad Trek.
I don’t know that I can agree with that. People forget the sheer glut of Trek that we got during that period – with each season being 22 episodes or more (give or take). By the time Enterprise went off the air, that’s 25 seasons. As I wrote in my newspaper column at the time, hardcore fans may have been able to cite chapter and verse regarding the differences between the various shows, but for the average, occasional viewer, that’s 25 years of basically the same show, with the same sorts of characters – give or take a few pointy ears and lumpy foreheads. In the modern world, a small, dedicated audience (probably one smaller than Enterprise had) can keep a show alive. In that time, it couldn’t. Whether Enterprise was good, bad or indifferent, the law of diminishing returns hits at some point or other
@16/Eduardo: “Trek just wasn’t a draw in a landscape that had shows like Alias and Lost”
Those were the biggest scripted shows and the big three networks certainly dominated, but sports and reality tv (American Idol) were far ahead of most other shows (a repeat of The Apprentice got better ratings than “Stratagem” for cryin’ out loud!). For further context Enterprise season 3 was the same year as Firefly, and Stargate SG1 (season 7 iirc).
In most cases UPN was competing with the WB for 4th or 5th place and Enterprise was getting beaten by the likes of Smallville or a regular basis. Enterprise had its problems, but UPN had a whole other set of problems that didn’t help either.
@21/twels: “People forget the sheer glut of Trek that we got during that period – with each season being 22 episodes or more (give or take).”
Actually the normal season length for Berman-era Trek was 26 episodes, which was pretty typical when TNG began, but the Trek shows kept it up for 16 years, even though nearly every other commercial TV series dropped to 22-episode seasons during that time. The only seasons that weren’t 26 episodes were TNG season 2 (22 episodes, starting a month late due to the ’88 writers’ strike), DS9 season 1 (20 episodes due to being a midseason premiere), VGR season 1 (16 episodes for the same reason and due to having its last 4 postponed to season 2), and ENT seasons 3 & 4 (24 & 22 respectively due to falling ratings resulting in lower budgets).
“for the average, occasional viewer, that’s 25 years of basically the same show”
How is that a bad thing? The average viewer loves watching the same thing over and over again. That’s why Murder, She Wrote and Law & Order lasted so long. That’s why interchangeable, formulaic series that are only superficially different from each other have always been the bread and butter of commercial TV. The average viewer likes average stuff.
If anything, you have it backward — it’s the hardcore audience that would’ve gotten tired of the sameness and wanted change, while the casual, occasional viewers wouldn’t have minded just dropping in now and then for some familiar, cozy comfort food.
The problem, once again, is that the show just wasn’t that good anymore. People always try to blame success or failure on what a show or movie does instead of how well it does it. Which makes no sense, since if it worked that way, it would be easy to know what makes something succeed, and nothing would ever fail. Instead, when one thing succeeds, a dozen productions try to copy what it does, but fail because they just weren’t done as well.
mea culpa, Firefly coincided with Enterprise season 2 not 3.
@23 said: If anything, you have it backward — it’s the hardcore audience that would’ve gotten tired of the sameness and wanted change, while the casual, occasional viewers wouldn’t have minded just dropping in now and then for some familiar, cozy comfort food.
If that was the case, the networks would still be airing “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza.” Trends change and audiences get tired of seeing the same things – even if they loved those things the first time – and even if there hasn’t been an appreciable drop off in quality. Hence why “Law & Order” and several of its spin-offs got the axe. Hence why Scott Bakula’s NCIS spin-off got the axe. I think we’re also seeing the same thing at your local multiplex, with “superhero fatigue.” It isn’t that the movies are any better or worse than earlier variations on the theme. It’s the theme itself that is growing old
I just wanted to add that that’s a more macro view of the franchise as a whole and that I certainly don’t discount that shows can turn bad for any number of reasons
@25 / I think that that’s a reasonable point. It’s worth remembering that, when we talk about Star Trek in this context, we need to discuss the whole glut of Trek-ish sci-fi shows like Babylon 5 and Farscape and SG-1 that bloomed in the 90s following the success of TNG, and which was, for whatever reason (fashion? market saturation? lingering cultural impact of 9/11?) largely winding down by this stage in the 2000s. Notably, this was also around the time that the new BSG came out, and it dialled back hard on the more widely mocked aspects of the genre (no rubber-forehead aliens, no ray guns, no idealism).
@25/twels: “If that was the case, the networks would still be airing “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza.” Trends change and audiences get tired of seeing the same things – even if they loved those things the first time – and even if there hasn’t been an appreciable drop off in quality.”
It doesn’t have to be a single show, just a variety of ones that offer the same kind of formula to casual viewers. Westerns were ubiquitous on TV for at least two decades. Courtroom dramas, murder mysteries, and detective shows were perennials for much longer. Crime procedurals have been a go-to formula for ages.
And don’t mistake general trends for universal laws. Star Trek was an exception, both in the ’60s and in the ’80s-’90s. That’s why it stood out from the pack. So it doesn’t make sense to argue that Trek’s success or failure was a function of general viewing trends. Trek stood out from the trends. Trek started trends. TNG pioneered first-run syndicated dramas, and was the harbinger of the maturation of American science fiction TV from schlock with rare exceptions to a higher level of sophistication and class. It did that, not by following a trend, but by being exceptionally good. (Yes, even TNG’s much-reviled first season, as weak as it was compared to later seasons, was a gourmet feast to 1980s SFTV audiences stuck with the likes of Knight Rider and Manimal.)
“I think we’re also seeing the same thing at your local multiplex, with “superhero fatigue.” It isn’t that the movies are any better or worse than earlier variations on the theme. It’s the theme itself that is growing old”
No, that’s an excuse. The real problem is studio mismanagement — they demand that every movie be a billion-dollar blockbuster, so they’re just too expensive to turn a profit. They stupidly abandoned making mid-budget movies that don’t need to bring in such huge box office numbers to recoup their expense. That’s combined with the fact that movie theater attendance plummeted during the pandemic and has never recovered, because audiences feel less motivated to pay for costly theater tickets and food when they can just wait for a movie to come out on streaming. It’s not just superhero movies that are failing in theaters lately, it’s all sorts of movies.
If I were asked to generate a headcanon explanation for the logic of the Xindi prototype attack, it would have to be that it was done at the instigation of the Sphere-Builders, who must have determined that the future they desired was more probable with the attack than without it. That alone would not explain WHY this might be the case, of course. Perhaps the tenuous Xindi alliance was likely to waver or fracture when the time came to actually pull the trigger on eradicating an entire world. The need to commit genocide is a big thing to take on faith, after all, however persuasive the Sphere-Builders might be. Perhaps the early strike was a way to get potential holdouts committed — to establish open hostilities that could then be escalated. To cross the Rubicon, in other words. And perhaps the odds that Starfleet would discover the nature of the threat AND one of their ships would survive the Expanse were simply so negligible as to be outweighed by these or similar factors. This is just spitballing, of course … I’d have to give it more serious thought. But it would boil down to the notion that the reasoning of beings who can actually get a read on potential futures might wind up being rather different from what seems reasonable to those of us who can only observe the past and present. It feels a bit like cheating … but in the end, I’d have preferred a hand-wavey explanation to none at all.
I agree that the MACOs could have used a bit more gung-ho swagger: I honestly feel that STAR TREK would be an excellent stage on which to play out deconstructions of ‘Bug war’ type science fiction and action hero morality (Not least because I suspect that the ALIEN franchise and STAR TREK are best served when they act as polar opposites to each other – the former with it’s many elements of Cosmic Horror and the latter rich with extraterrestrials one can carry on a conversation with).
Sadly Season 3 was probably made at the wrong time of the century for this sort of deconstruction, giving the looming shadow of the War on Terror.
One last notion: It occurs to me that a useful way to leave the season a little less stretched would have been to include one or two episodes showing what was going on back at Starfleet Command while Enterprise was sailing through the Delphic Expanse.
If nothing else, showing United Earth dealing with it’s own problems would have helped put the strange absence of local defences in the Solar System into proper perspective (and it would have been interesting to see the Fog of War in action, as NX-01 moved so far beyond Earth’s reach).
KRAD, I hate to say this since I usually respect and value your opinions on ST, but Season 3 of Enterprise is the worst season of Star Trek ever since Season 3 of TOS. It does not deserve even a slightly higher ranking than the first two seasons. Everything to do with the Xindi is garbage, the 9/11 parallels added a lot of unnecessary grittiness to the show, and season 3 still had to deal with the horrible Temporal Cold War BS on top of this new overarching plot. I thought it was a big fat bust all around, though I biasedly prefer Trek to be episodic rather than tackle multi-episode plotlines (as great as seasons 4 and 5 of DS9 are). I feel like Enterprise wouldn’t have got canned so soon if they did for season 3 what they did for season 4, but I’d bet money the failure of the Xindi arc is what accelerated its demise.
Apologies if this post comes off as a bit “nerd ragey,” it’s ultimately me saying “agree to disagree.” I just wanted to voice how much I hated the Xindi arc. I was under the impression a lot more people hated it than just me and one other guy I talk a lot of Trek with. Anyway, I guarantee the last season is the best of Enterprise and it does make me sad that it showed some promise before getting the boot, but that still doesn’t change this being the worst Trek series out there for my money. And yet even despite its attempted course correction, the series finale is the absolute worst in Trek history too. I really hope that one gets a 1 or lower!
Mike: If everyone agreed on everything, the world would be a boring place. Having said that, I went into this rewatch not having seen any of season 3 of Enterprise and — and this is purely anecdotal, of course — most of the people I talked to said that season 3 was much better than the first two.
(Also, you need to get way more annoying to even approach properly “nerd ragey”…. *chortle* )
Ultimately, it’s the same as seasons one and two, to me, not better or worse: it’s a good idea with absolutely terrible execution by a writing staff that refused to think things through, and that always defaulted to plots and solutions that weren’t complex and were the easiest way in and out.
As for season 4, which I have already seen most of and will actually be re-watching — you’ll see! :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’m honored you responded to me so quickly! I’m now under the impression you mostly gave that extra point since S3 at least tried something different and attempted to break away from the stale complacency of the first two seasons. What it did wasn’t great, but at least it swung harder for the fences. I can respect that.
What I don’t respect is T’Pol having become “T’Porn” instead. She already wasn’t my favorite character, hot take, but this season just got skeevy. I guess this was just TV at the time, though… I mean it’s nowhere near as bad as Game of Thrones got in this regard several years later, but I’m still not a fan of it. At any rate, I’m looking forward to see what you have to say on the least worst of Enterprise!
As I always say, the warp factor rating is the least important part of any rewatch entry. Ultimately what bumped the rating up a bit for this season was the very strong set of climactic episodes: “Proving Ground,” “Stratagem,” “Azati Prime,” “Damage,” “The Forgotten,” and “The Council,” in particular, were all very good, among the show’s best.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I didn’t much like T’Pol from the start, but on rewatch you’ve got to give Blalock credit for making the most of it.
I have a desire to quibble whether the MACOs just do what ship’s security officers do anyway. In my head they are different types of specialist, the MACOs being highly trained soldiers and only that, not to offend anyone that I just did.
When aliens board the ship in the first half of an episode, the dramatic role of any people with guns on our side is to fail to stop the aliens doing what they want and usually leaving, with prisoners, property, or just having broken our stuff. A commander wants trespassers efficiently repelled, but that will bring the story to conclusion far too soon. So incidents like that are rarely shown. Perhaps it would be nice to see the aliens walking over regular crew, a figure of speech, then getting knocked around by the professionals, and that’s when they leave, with their loot.
A glitch possibly due to renaming “Extinction”, “Fun With DNA”: I believe that and not “Doctor’s Orders” is where you meant to place Phlox’s use of T’Pol’s “active DNA”, unless Phlox’s unusual experience in the latter is due to a habit of inhaling it.
37. I respectfully disagree there was absolutely no reason to add the MACOs and they added NOTHING to the season. They didn’t do anything Reed’s security team couldn’t have done. Email based RPGs were big at the time and there was this obsession with adding marines/MACOs to them and I can’t help but wonder if that contributed to adding completely useless people to Enterprise’s crew. Because we never saw or head about any kind of marines again with the exception of West being a Colonel (with a Captain insignia) for absolutely no reason in Keith’s “favorite” movie “The Undiscovered Country”
Season 3 of Enterprise is a very mixed bag of highs and lows which hit both the extremes of both occasionally right after each other (“Hatchery” into “Azati Prime”). I simultaneously like and dislike this season: The Temporal Cold War stuff that kickstarted this entire thing leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, but there is a lot of good storytelling I really like alongside a bunch of half-baked concepts. A rating of 5 or 6 seems about right even if I disagree with some of the individual episode ratings. Brannon and Braga get an A for ambition, but they really should have brought someone in who had more experience with season-long story arcs to focus their efforts.
The MACOs are an interesting concept that were not used or depicted as what they supposed to be as Earth’s actual military. You would think that they would have been drilling for or had been scenarios exactly like in “Anomaly” at the very least. Same thing with the rivalry between Reed and Hayes and how Mayweather was abandoned; instead of doing silly episodes like “North Star” or burning garbage such as “Hatchery”, why not dedicate more episodes to the friction between the former and then give poor Travis a “life in the day of” episode to dive into why he’s still so optimistic in “Damage.”
On the topic of how the most receptive to the Humans trying to convince them to not blow up their planet are in fact the ones who look most alike, I concede that it’s a tiresome trope. Hatred I have for “Hatchery” aside. it would have been MUCH better if the Insectoids figured out that Enterprise had been there and had saved their young. That way in the Council chambers, a very unhuman species combines the evidence they’re presented with alongside the knowledge that humans were in fact not murderous psychopaths to side with them. Heck, the same thing could have happened with Jannar learning of the events of “The Shipment” and it would be a very Trek thing to do that the random acts of kindness and not-murder pay off.
I disagree that the season should have been much shorter. If the half-baked ideas were expanded upon into actual plots, this length of season could have worked alongside not essentially abandoning main cast members. In all, a watchable and even occasionally very good season, but the flaws match the very good parts.
@39. FRT “they really should have brought someone in who had more experience with season-long story arcs to focus their efforts”
I think they actually did try, they asked DS9 producer Ira Stephen Behr but his unvarnished opinion of the series was a bit too much for them at that time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XnCIPczNLE
Okay, I think I can comment again.
This season of Enterprise always stands out to me as the one where they gave up on the show’s original premise. Thankfully, season 4, under the guidance of the late Manny Coto, would find the show finding it’s way back to episodic adventures. I’m very keen to see your take on this final season of Berman-era Trek, krad, after we get past another Nazis in Trek episode.
RIP, Manny Coto.
Nope, still can’t use the comment function…
The problem with the Xindi story arc season is that the story hever really has a villian. Everyone is a misunderstood victim who really just needs a hug.The story arc begins with a planatary attack killing millions. The story needed to have kept that intensity. Have the Xindi be an enemy and stay an enemy. Everyone doesnt have to like the Earth.. Every conflict is not a psychodrama . Archer having to come to grips with his role as warrior, not explorer, not peacemaker would have made a powerful season .
I thought T’Pol’s halting explanation about the horses was meant to remind us that she’s an alien, she’s really making it up as she goes along – more than any human would need to.
@43/siempre: “The problem with the Xindi story arc season is that the story hever really has a villian.”
Sure it does — Dolim and the Sphere Builders.
And what’s wrong with a story where a villain turns out to be sympathetic at the end? A lot of great stories are like that, e.g. “The Devil in the Dark.”
Their big arc wasn’t perfect, but I give them credit for trying something new. And it brought us a lot of good moments.
I feel like the problems with Season 3 are basically scribbling outside the lines rather than serious structural ones.
1. Why did they use the prototype on Earth?
This is one of the most common complaints about Season 3 and it’s literally like a one line fix. “It was a prototype we thought would actually work and destroy Earth in one blast.” Get rid of the test element and instead they fully expected it to work and it didn’t. Now they’re panicking and trying to get it to work. People make mistakes, technology breaks (especially in Star Trek). It was a sneak attack that didn’t work as perfectly as they expected.
2. Vulcan neuro-pressure
The thing that made this so annoying was the PG fakeoutness of it all versus actually treating it with the maturity it deserved. Here’s an idea, “T’Pol senses that Trip is really messed up from his sister’s death and then makes a move to begin a romance with him because, yes, she’s into him. Drama comes from the fact Trip doesn’t know if it’s due to pity or genuine interest.” Instead of the fakeout sex substitute, they actually just have sex. Because…consensting adults. You don’t need to make that porn.
3. Archer’s reactions are insane
I get that they wanted to have Archer be the source of peace but his reaction to the attack that killed 3,000,000 people is deranged. He keeps saying, “We have to prevent a war!” Which, bluntly, is not the reaction when you have had millions dead. You are ALREADY at war. You want to STOP a war or WIN a war. You cannot prevent what has already happened, especially when the other side wants genocide.
4. The Prequel nature of the show hurts it
Part of what always sucked (and I hate to use that word but it’s true) is the heavy sense of it being disconnected from the Federation’s past despite the claim of Prequel status. It’s why people liked the Andorian episodes. They feel like they were building on something established. The Suliban, Temporal Cold War, and Xindi arcs are all things you’d think we’d have heard of (along with the NX-01 itself). The Xindi war suffered for the fact that it is probably the biggest war the human has fought and first interstellar one and everyone was basically expecting the Romulan War. Either establish this is not THE past of the TOS era but being altered by the TCW (maybe Archer never made it on Earth without the Suliban attack) or go heavier on the buildup to the Federation.
5. The Xindi are awful people and the resolution is unsatisfying if not amoral
There’s some interesting IDEAS with the Xindi being five races that blew each other up and live as a bunch of nomads across multiple planets but they’re frankly one of the worst developed races in the setting. They launch a genocidal attack on Earth, kill 3,000,000 people, and basically Archer just says, “You’re forgiven. Let’s let bygones be bygones.” I love Star Trek’s message of peace but the lack of any justice is deeply troubling. The war criminals just go on their merry way. The Female Changeling goes to prison for her crimes. It’s easy to fall into revenge but the ending here is just Archer letting them off the hook for their part in all this.